From CNN this cold new year’s morning. It’s Middle East Smackdown MMIX!!

The first day of 2009 dawned in Gaza with a sixth day of Israeli airstrikes, a bombardment Israel's prime minister vowed would not end until Hamas militants quit firing rockets into the Jewish state.

Yawn. Is it really news that a centuries-long battle of mutually exclusive religions continues? Really?

Meanwhile, five rockets were launched into Israel, including two medium-range rockets that fell near the city of Beer Sheva, nearly 30 km (19 miles) outside Gaza, the IDF reported.

19 miles. It seems Hamas has scored themselves a few higher quality rockets. Wonder how they got those? My guess is some of the billions of dollars we sent to the Persian Gulf this past summer when gasoline prices were topping 4 bucks a gallon has finally filtered it’s way down through the Saudi “royal family” (they’re only dictators if we don’t like them) to find it’s way into the coffers of militant Wahabbist Islam. In truth, it probably doesn’t have to travel far, but we look the other way because the price of oil is set in US dollars, and in the world of modern finance, that pretty much defines the value of our currency, indeed our entire energy-intensive economy.

From there, it’s just a hop across the desert to the arms dealer, a skip over to Egypt, and a jump into the Gaza Strip. Rockets rain down and kill a few innocent Israelis, The Israelis respond with US-supplied planes, missiles and bombs, killing Palestinians at about a 100 to 1 ratio, enraging all the Islamic world. The US expresses false concern. Repeat.

From a certain angle, in a certain light, we appear to be financing both sides of a proxy war pitting our greed against our mythology. The status quo is what we call “stability”.

I wanted to briefly get back to the Roger Lowenstein book I mentioned a couple of posts back. I’ve now finished While America Aged. It’s a good read, chronicling just how pension debts came to be such a huge problem for this country, but I was a bit disappointed with the final chapter, Conclusion: The Way Out. It begins with this paragraph:

America is sitting on a retirement time bomb. Companies such as General Motors are fading fast and governments such as the city of San Diego are overrun with obligations. As the population ages, the problem will only get worse. Clearly, retirees need to be taken care of. But the solution cannot be to ruin once great firms or to impoverish whole cities and future taxpayers.

But other than calling for a national version of 401(k) accounts — an idea he attributes to Hillary Clinton — there’s nothing remotely new about the solutions Lowenstein offers. They are mostly strategies that sensible, level-headed people have been promoting for decades, only to have them beaten back by lobbyists and the right-wing noise machine.

From simple things like enacting legislation requiring pension sponsors to fund benefits they have committed to as they accrue (duh!) and strengthening Social Security by increasing the payroll tax and repaying the Social Security funds that have been “borrowed” from the surplus, to big ideas like national health care, they are all steps that could have been taken long ago, but for a lack of inclination and/or political will from our elected officials.

Lowenstein sees trouble ahead for those of us with a little gray in our hair:

... the private pension industry is gradually dying.

Whatever relief this brings to corporate shareholders, from the employees’ point of view the demise of pensions is a calamity in the making. True, firms without pension plans usually offer 401(k)s, which have the attraction of mobility (employees can take their accounts from job to job). However, 401(k)s don’t offer anything like the security of a pension plan.

According to the Federal Reserve, among families with retirement accounts, the median family has only $31,000. That would be okay to live on for perhaps one year; to retire on it for a lifetime would be a joke. And a third of the workforce has no retirement savings at all.

That $31,000 figure Lowenstein quotes is from a Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances taken well before our current economic crisis, so the situation is now undoubtedly even worse.

The notion of at least a secure, if not comfortable, retirement has been a mainstay of my generation’s version of the American dream. I fear that for a great many of us that dream is dying along side the labor movement from which it came.

I’ve been fighting off a bad cold for the last several days, so I’ve not had much energy for anything. In fact, I’ve done most of that “fighting” from a horizontal position, loaded up on decongestants, antihistamines, aspirin and cough drops. Reading. A friend loaned me a copy of Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and that burned up a couple days. Even sick, I couldn’t put it down.

A while back, I recommended Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner. This one’s every bit as good, if not better. Like that first novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns spans the modern, war-torn history of Afghanistan. It is a heart-rending story of a country and it’s people that left me with a profound sense of sadness and regret. And anger.

Sadness for a country that has been sorely used and abused by it’s own leaders and the rest of the world. The Afghan history provides repeated and stark reminders that no matter how dire a situation is, the wrong people, with the wrong agenda, can make it worse.

Regret that my own country has played a large role in this sordid tale, twice failing Afghanistan. First abandoning the country to the Mujahedin when the Soviets pulled out in 1989, and later, after our 2001 invasion, losing interest in our mission to rid them of the world’s worst actors, in favor of putting some shock and awe on Saddam Hussein. One can only imagine how Afghanistan would look today if we had spent all that time and money and resources there instead of Iraq.

My anger comes as a father of daughters. It makes me wish I had the power to send an army to Afghanistan. An army with two missions. The first to educate every female child in the country; the second to kill every damn person who opposes doing so.

In my travels about the intertoobz today I found this excellent essay by Jonathan Cutler from 2006 entitled Beyond Incompetence: Washington’s War in Iraq in which he lays out the basic policy differences between the traditional conservatives that made up the administrations of Bush the elder, smarter (and for that matter, the Clenis) and the neo-conservatives that crafted dubya’s disastrous drunken cowboy foreign policy.

According to Cutler, it all boils down to Israel and oil. (Doesn’t it always?) For the neo-cons, whom Cutler labels Right Zionists, the US should use Israel and Iraqi Shiites as proxies to protect our interests and police the region. For the traditionalists from Poppy Bush’s era, the Right Arabists, oil flows more easily from the region by protecting the Saudi regime and Sunni Arab dominance. For either side in this debate, there is never a question whether the US should be forcing it’s will onto the Middle East, only how it should be done. Cutler finishes with this paragraph:

The Left would do well to remember that there are at least two imperialist camps in Washington -- one Right Arabist and one Right Zionist. Both are "sensible," within the framework of imperialist statecraft. Neither deserves our embrace. Will Sistani -- like the Shah before him -- collaborate with Israel and police US interests in the Middle East? Or will the Baathists and Saudis patrol the region for the US? These are urgent questions for US imperialism. Not so for the anti-imperialist Left. Our demand is simple: Bring the troops home. Now.

Yes. Ben Franklin said "Power does not make right." One of my great (probably false) hopes for Michelle’s husband is that he will not continue to run roughshod over the rest of the world merely because we have the largest army.

Last week, right in the middle of writing my obligatory "See you later dubya, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" post, something went wrong with my blogging software.

At first it was just a minor glitch that deleted the text of all my unpublished posts. I was able to recover probably 90% of my work, and I moved on, figuring the problem was probably something I had caused. (I do sometimes get behind the wheel of this thing while drinking.)

Then a couple days later it happened again, only this time the text of all my blog posts was gone, more than two years worth of my amateur philosophizing. Again I was able to recover most of my work, but it was just the beginning of a slow motion train wreck.

Every time I used the software, it deleted all my blog posts. And every time I went into the archives to recover the blog posts, the archive I had previously used to recover was now blank also. This forced me to use an older archived version of my site every time I had to recover, so every time I went to add a post, I would lose a few more. The harder I worked, the more damage I did, moonwalking my blog away.

I was left with no choice but to abandon ship. I had planned to eventually rebuild this site using Dreamweaver anyway, but I was expecting to do it at my leisure, not as a crash course.

So far my only significant accomplishment is downloading the site code from my Web server directly into Dreamweaver. This saved all my archives going back, so for now I've only lost the 6 or so most recent posts — masterpieces, every one — that I never published for fear of destroying the online version of the site as well. I might have wound up with a website consisting of two years of blog titles.

Now if I can figure out how to add posts to the site as it now exists, I can at least keep publishing while I learn how to fly this thing. This will be my first attempt to upload words to the mother ship. Engage.

When I was a kid, back in the '70s, my friends and I spent a lot of time skating. There was a period there when skating was cool, everyone was into Roller Derby or Roller Boogie or Roller Disco. I spent at least one night a week at the local roller rink, strutting my stuff in bell-bottoms and rock concert jersey, long hair parted in the middle and feathered back just so, big old Goody comb sticking out of my back pocket to keep it that way.

I even had my own skates, a Christmas present from my parents one year, solid black leather with charcoal gray wheels (two in the front and two in the back, not four in-line) and a custom carrying case. With those things on my feet, I could hokey-pokey with the best of them.

I eventually outgrew those roller skates. By that time I was in my teens and roller skating wasn't so cool any more. I switched to ice skating, even played a little recreational hockey. Bought a pair of hockey skates that I still own and probably still fit me, though they haven't seen ice in many years.

So recently I was talking to some co-workers about my efforts to beat back the middle-age paunch via low-impact exercise and when one of them suggested roller blading. I was immediately intrigued by the idea because, after all, I already know how to skate. Hell, I used to be good at it.

So despite being keenly aware that skating is still not considered cool, I bought myself a pair of roller blades. (A joke going around the disc golf course: What's the hardest part about buying roller blades? Telling your dad you're gay.)

My local park has an asphalt jogging trail, but it's very hilly, so for my first outing, I decided to drive the extra distance to another park located in the Missouri River bottoms. It's nice and flat. I pulled into a parking spot and hopped out, eager to try out my shiny new skates with their blaze-orange asphalt wheels, but things immediately started to go haywire. It was like I had somehow fallen asleep and woke up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

I put the first skate on while standing in the open door of my truck, using the door sill to rest the skate on lace it up. No problem there, but on the second skate I realized I had already made a wrong decision. It was impossible to stand on the skate I already had on while putting the other one on, so I just turned around and hopped up into the seat to finish the job. Then I hopped back down.

And immediately busted my ass. My legs went under the door and I hit hard on my tailbone, compressing my spine painfully and popping my teeth together. It happened so fast, and caught me so completely by surprise that I felt the need to just sit there for a few seconds to regroup, but it was a nice day and the park was full of people, all of them seemingly watching the dumbass old guy fall out of his truck. So I bounced right back up onto my feet and did a little dance for them. I imagine I resembled a man fighting off a swarm of hornets, what with all the spinning around and waving of my arms.

Right away I realized two things. First, these are the slickest things I've ever had on my feet, beyond frictionless, it's like they are motorized. Even on level ground, it's completely impossible to stand still. Second, if I had gone to my local, hilly park I would already be hurt.

Undaunted, I set off down the trail, every muscle in my body working overtime just keeping me upright. At first, the skates wanted to go so much faster than I did that I was constantly in danger of falling backward. I remedied that situation by bending my legs a little and leaning forward, pushing off like an ice skater.

Of course that led to even more speed, but simply coasting to slow down was impossible. The path was very rough, and whenever I stopped moving my feet, the vibrations traveled right up my legs causing serious control problems. I was alternating between careening down the path way too fast for my skill level and coasting erratically, arms windmilling and body jerking around like I was having a seizure.

Within a quarter mile, I began having pains in muscles I've never even felt before. By a half mile, I was experiencing lower back spasms and cramps all around my ribcage. Luckily, the park provides the occasional bench in the grass beside the trail. I began using them like those runaway truck ramps you see in the mountains, hurtling off the asphalt, using the grass to slow down, and grabbing the bench to stop. And then lying on it for a minute or two till the pain susided.

After a mile or so, I was in agony and would have quit, but by then I was on the other side of the lake, a long way from my truck, so I stayed with it and eventually the pain in my body seemed to subside a little. Or perhaps it was just drowned out by the new and wicked burning sensations coming from the area of my shin bones. Or the damage being done to my feet by this brand new, very stiff pair of roller blades. One of the best feelings I have ever felt was when I got back to my truck and took those damn things off. But.

But I made it about three miles and I never fell again. And toward the end there, I think I awoke some of those old memories in these old muscles. Enough to make me want to try again when the snow melts.